


gingerbread

by loupettes



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Christmas Decorations, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28051227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loupettes/pseuds/loupettes
Summary: “I was wondering what else I was going to have to do to get a kiss from you.”Ten x Rose, Christmassy fluff based on the prompt "Gingerbread". Rose awakes to find she's now living in a life-sized - or rather, TARDIS sized - gingerbread house.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	gingerbread

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the prompt "Day 2: Gingerbread" for "31 Days of Ficmas, 2020 Edition" by @[doctorroseprompts](https://doctorroseprompts.tumblr.com)

She awoke to that dreaded, godawful ringing in her ears. The one that was so loud if turned her head into this battleground of pain and relentless suffering. She rolled over. No. Not today. Back to sleep. 

She gave it all of about two minutes before she accepted her headache was too bloody dreadful to ignore. Her groan was loud but perfectly justifiable, she figured, as she attempted to keep her brain in solid form during her transition from horizontal to vertical. She sat up, leaning against the bed frame for a moment or two with her eyes closed.

She had sobbed. Ugly, feeling-sorry-for-yourself tears last night. For no particular reason other than it was a Tuesday, apparently, looking back on it. She’d just had one of those miserable days where everything went wrong: she felt useless up against the Rutans; her eyelashes had started growing in mismatched directions so her make up looked awful; she’d fallen over ( _that’s why your knee is burning!_ ), making a right tit of herself in the process; and he’d been his usual oblivious self. Sometimes the flirting was off the charts, and sometimes it was very one-sided. Always very much _her-_ sided. Yesterday - well, recently in fact - it had been a one-man game. What finally did it was asking him if he wanted to watch a film on the sofa and he declined, giving her one of _those_ looks in return. You know, those looks that say “why would you think that’s something I want to do?”. Why would he, after all, when he’s some fancy time lord ponce who’s far too above watching Julia Stiles pour her heart out in _the_ most devastating love poem ever written with his humdrum human friend? Actually, she probably had Julia Stiles to thank for those tears last night then, too. 

She pushed the covers back in annoyance. At what, she couldn’t say, other than the obvious - _everything._ She stomped aggressively to her draws, pulling out a woolly jumper and some cosy socks. It was very rarely this cold on the TARDIS, so he must be fixing the heating. She gave her face a quick wash in her bathroom sink, brushed her teeth and groaned at her appearance: dark circles, bit blotchy - _lot_ blotchy, nest hair, the full works. Out of sheer resentment, she refused to pander to her embarrassing need for his attention and yanked the door open in search of a tea.

She gasped when she found herself in a long corridor of… what is that, _gingerbread_? It _smelt_ like gingerbread all around her, but her nose was quite a bit stuffy so it wasn't the most reliable source of information. But the walls - or, whatever they were on this space ship - were now covered in this smooth brown texture that might seem like any other smooth brown texture had it not been for the white border of _icing_ defining all edges of the walls and doorframes. Little multicoloured dots of what she could only assume were Smarties were pushed, rather quite neatly, into the icing. Was it icing? She finally took her first step forward and, despite wearing socks, was confused by the softness of the floor beneath her. She glanced down to see white felt, _tons_ of it, stacked onto of another in an uncanny resemblance to snow. Her brow furrowed and she leaned closer to the wall opposite her to inspect. Her nose twitched automatically and she cautiously brought her finger to the surface. Yep, soft. Cookie-like. _What_? She pressed her fingers deeper in to the ‘wall’, leaving them for a couple of seconds to soak up the surface layer before bringing them to her nose. She hesitated, sticking her tongue out- 

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” 

She jumped, spinning to her left to see him looking back at her, leaning against the still unverified gingerbread wall with his arms folded. Before she even considered her surroundings and him now being situated in them, before she thought about how ridiculously gorgeous his face was or even before she could smile in return, she realised he wasn’t wearing his suit. He was wearing a god damn _Christmas_ jumper. His lips curled at her shock, but he continued, pointing at her indignantly. “Don’t go sticking your tongue to things when you don’t know what they are.”

She wiped her fingers on her pyjama trousers. “Never stopped _you_.”

His grin faded. “ _I_ might not die from cherry stones or wild mushrooms or some other completely harmless thing.”

“No, but you can’t take _Aspirin_.”

"There’s unlikely to be _Aspirin_ inside a wall, Rose.”

“There’s also not a lot of chance there’ll be _cherry stones_ in a wall.”

“Well, my point still stands!” He unfolded his arms, shrugging in exasperation. “You lot are even allergic to too much bloody _air.”_

“And a very good morning to you too.”

“Oh!” he beamed. “Good morning.”

Before she had a chance to react embarrassingly to that darn smile of his, she pressed on. “Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“Why are the walls now made of gingerbread?”

His joyful grin became more of a smirk and he shook his head. “Na. Hate to be a party pooper but that’s just a little jigeroo of the old chameleon circuit. She can’t blend in on the outside anymore, but that’s just her ability to recognise the time period and assign an appropriate dress mechanism thingy being a bit jammed. But she can _certainly_ be persuaded to blend to an existing image of, say, something that might make her fluffy pink and yellow friend happy.”

Her heart fluttered; she could have sworn the ship hummed gently at his words. She shook her head. “Thanks for explaining that _how_ question I didn’t ask, now let’s try again with the _why?”_

 _“Oh!”_ He took a few steps towards her, pointing at his jumper. “It’s nearly Christmas.”

“Where?”

“Back on Earth!” His eyes narrowed in concern. “Have you not been keeping up? Not like you.”

She shuffled on the spot, pulling her sleeves down to cover her hands and folding her arms awkwardly. Truth was: she hadn’t. She adored Christmas, how could she not? But she was being far too hopeful to think it mattered on a spaceship that travelled through time with a man that wasn’t even human. “I guess not.”

“You alright?” he asked, concerned. 

“Yeah. Suppose I just… haven’t checked in a while. With home stuff.”

The Doctor made a noise that was as close to an ‘ _I don’t believe you, let’s revisit this later_ ’ verbal statement as a non-verbal sound could be. She smiled in reassurance, and he grinned back. “Well, lucky for you, one of us is keeping track. So, follow me.”

He held out his arm and she giggled, leaping to his side. He made that dopey little noise she loved when he laughed inwardly in content. “Colour me surprised, but you don’t strike me as a Christmas festivities kind of fella.”

“ _I don’t strike you as the Christma_ \- what sort of thing is that to say to a person you supposedly like!”

She chuckled. “Alright, I'll rephrase - what’s brought this on?”

“Like I said. S’Christmas. Before you do anything else at Christmas, you make a gingerbread house.”

“I can’t fault your logic, there.”

It really was the entire TARDIS - well, so far anyway - covered in gingerbread. She’d been on this ship quite sometime now and hadn’t seen all of it, so she couldn't be sure he'd decorated deeper into the ship but for now, every wall she could see was now donned in sweets, mostly, amongst other festive decorations like acorns and berries. The ‘snow’ beneath her, she realised, had lights. Little golden specks of lights woven throughout that she hadn’t noticed before. She stopped, crouching down to run her fingers through in an attempt to find the wires before she agreed she didn’t want to spoil the fun by understanding the mechanics. She pulled herself back up and looked around, eyes wide as they took in the sight of a Christmas aboard the TARDIS. Last Christmas, of course, she’d been sent full throttle into the holiday when he blew himself up and decided to depart from this plane of existence, and then she spent the sequent week or so following the Christmas and New Year week aboard the TARDIS feeling a bit empty. This, though, was incredible: intricate little details of white icing piped onto the walls; large life-sized candy canes outside the doors into the next rooms; the ceiling above her covered in gorgeous garlands; the floor illuminated beneath them.

“Doctor, this is amazing.”

He grinned. “I know.”

“But really, why? Just woke up and thought ‘ _I fancy doing this today_ ’?”

“Do every other day of the year, don’t I?”

She shrugged; he was being particularly cryptic which meant she would only give herself a headache trying to find out his ulterior motive. “Alright, keep your secrets.” 

They got to the main control room and Rose hadn’t a chance in hell at not bursting to gasp in surprise. She’d never _seen_ so many sweets and decorations, candy canes and smarties and all sorts of boxes and piles where, if she remembered correctly, the control panel used to lie. 'Used to' being the key; it had since become a vessel made of sugar. Other than that, the rest of the room was blank, undecorated, simply covered in a blank canvas of gingerbread. Strings of fairy lights dangled from the ceiling in densely packed rows, giving the familiar room a different glow than she was used to. She chuckled at the little weird circle things, that she never for the life of her knew what they were that dotted the walls of the control room, now covered in little white pompoms. 

“Alright, truth time,” he began. “There would have been a lot more sweets for us to use if you’d have woken up earlier.”

“You ate some, didn’t you?”

“Some, yes. I shall not disclose the exact amount. What matters the most is we have a _big_ ship. It’s gonna take us a while. We need to be strategic.”

She scoffed. “Since when have you _ever_ been strategic in your plans?”

“I always have impeccable strategy planning skills!” he protested. “They don’t always reveal themselves to me until a little later into the game - admittedly, quite often _during_ the game - but they’re there nonetheless.”

“Hold on” - she pinched her nose, closing her eyes and wincing at the thought of the vastness of this ship - “did you just say we’re about to decorate this _entire_ ship?”

He nudged her arm playfully, picking up a candy cane from the floor. “Na. Well, yes. We’re going to have a race.” He gestured up and around the room with the straight end of the candy cane. “But first: the control room."

“What’s the point of decorating this entire ship of gingerbread we can’t eat?”

“ _What’s the point?”_ His mouth hung open in shock. _“Whats the po_ \- you know, I don’t know _what_ has gotten into you this morning but I’m going to fix it, whatever it is.”

His stupid face, she laughed. That gullible, adorable idiot. She knew he was trying to cheer her up, which meant he must have known how she spent last night. Her brow furrowed as she tried to work through her understanding of the evening in the added context of this morning - the man was an enigma. Always so hot and cold: last night? Not wanting a thing to do with her; and this morning? He’s decorated a gingerbread house. 

“You were having a pretty crap day yesterday, hmm?”

She averted her gaze and nodded - a little reluctantly. She hoped to god he hadn’t heard her discreet sobs and that he was only referencing her knee, but knowing him he’d probably heard all of it. 

He nudged her elbow playfully. She had no resistance to it, the only way she could react was to grin. It only widened stupidly so when he handed her a ridiculously ugly Christmas jumper: Grinch-green, a really terribly stitched and honestly quite frightening Santa in the middle with various glittery pompoms and, to her absolute joy, jingle bells. She went to take it from him, but he yanked it back before her fingers touched it. He held up one of his own fingers in anticipation, before pressing a button in the pompom of Santa’s hat that began singing a terribly out of tune, but impressively exempt of the TARDIS’ translation mechanisms variant of _Feliz Navidad_. 

“You’re right. I bloody love Christmas.”

“There she is!” he cackled. “First thing I thought - well, second thing - when I first saw you, was ‘ _that’s a Christmas Girl, that_ ’.”

She scoffed; memories of that terrible damp basement a lifetime ago flooded her. If she remembered correctly, and she might be wrong because her memory of that basement was very much limited in the panic of knowing she was about to die, but she was fairly certain she wasn’t wearing a hat that said ‘ _I <3 Christmas’_. “What gave me away?”

He sniffed proudly. “Just knew.”

“Alright, if you insist.” They exchanged jumpers, tossing him her very warm cosy one with this actually quite surprisingly warm new Christmas one. She paused, assessing the jumper and she nodded slowly in surprise, her smile widening. “Not bad!”

“Kept it warm for you, didn’t I!”

“So, what was the first thing?”

“Hmm?”

“You said you looked at me and the second thing you thought was ‘ _that’s a Christmas Girl’_. We’ll come back to the ‘ _that_ ’ bit in a mo,” she warned, “but what was the first thing?”

“Oh! I thought, ‘ _that girl’s about to die_ ’.”

“Two vitally important observations of equal necessity to note - interchangeable, really. Either or would have got me where I am today.”

“Hmm, I’m not so sure - if I’d have thought of 'thought two' first then I’d have pointed you to the Christmas mannequins on the floor above instead of telling you to run.”

“I always thought ‘ _the weirdest thing that could have ever happened in my life was meeting a 900-year-old alien in a basement of Henrik's before a mob of live mannequins about to kill me and blindly accepting his hand’_ , but I guess it could have been ‘ _meeting a 900-year-old alien in a basement of Henrik's before a mob of live mannequins about to kill me and he ran back to put a Christmas tree up._ ’"

"Gotta make dying somewhat pleasant, would've been the least I could do."

She crouched down to sift through the boxes of sweets. She had _a lot_ of questions, like why the hell there were shed tons of sweet boxes aboard the TARIDS, but every question seemed to always be answered by the only plausible offering: this was the _Doctor_. Life on this ship meant that she knew how to explain _nothing_ , which meant that she could explain everything. 

“Right. So,” he started, looking around him. “Start with the icing first. I learnt that the hard way last night.”

“You’re 900 years old,” she scoffed, “you only just learnt last night to start with the icing?”

“You take that end, I’ll take this one. We’ll meet in the middle.” He searched around him, narrowing his eyes. “What the bloody hell’d I do with that thing?” he muttered to himself.

“What thing?”

“The thing!”

She watched him helplessly search for a nondescript _thing_ using only his eyes. She looked up at the lights, wondering just how he’d managed to get all the way up to the top. “Starting to see why you didn’t join me to watch Heath Ledger blast his heart and soul out on the bleachers last night.”

He stopped searching, turning his attention back to her and scowling in genuine disappointment. “Well, if you’d have told me you were going with ’ _10 Things I Hate About You’,_ I wouldn't have stayed out here to decorate this ship on my tod.”

“If you like grand declarations of love _and_ Christmas, boy are you gonna love me when I tell you about this film called _‘Love Actually’!”_

She’d only realised just how many times she’d just said the word ‘ _love_ ’ in the silence that followed. And, she dreaded to recall, she might have even said something along the lines of _him loving her_. She wished she’d have asked more on that _how_ bit earlier, because she would love to know how to blend in with the TARDIS right now. She mentally added that to the list of things she regretted of the day so far, along with not deciding to brush her hair and sort out her face, being a bit miserable in her reaction to a holiday she bloody _loved_ in the face of rejection and, well, just getting out of bed in the first place. She had no idea how long they were silent for, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to lighten the mood. She only hoped he hadn’t read into it. She didn’t particularly want to look at his face, but she couldn’t help herself, and her heart just about stopped in its tracks when she saw him looking back at her nervously as predicted.

“I do indeed love all of those things.”

It was possible she was about to die. Just a regular day, a regular Tuesday. Nothing ordinary, nothing special. But his nerves, although only just visible to her, remained as he awaited her reply. She took a deep, internal breath and braced herself. “Me too.”

They smiled softly at each other and she realised how close they were standing to one another. Had they always been standing this close? She felt the heat reach her cheeks and looked away impulsively, half a second too soon to stop herself from now needing to add another thing to add to the list: tearing herself away from a _wonderful and very-well-might-have-lead-somewhere_ moment too soon - and she wasn’t even the one who normally got flustered! She shook her head, swallowed and lifted her gaze back to him, but he had already averted his to somewhere just over her shoulder. He dashed for whatever it was, and his sudden unannounced movement made her jump.

“Ah-ha! I _knew_ there was a second one somewhere!”

“A second what?”

“One of these!” He rooted through a nearby stash of sweets, extracting a pitifully small piping bag. He presented her with it with such _joy_ she almost felt bad for scoffing.

“Doctor. What do you want me to do with this?”

His joy was quickly replaced by unease. “Decorate the gingerbread?”

Baffled, she took the piping bag, already filled with icing. “I don’t know why I was expecting a giant piping bag for a giant ship, but start as we mean to go on, eh?”

It was probably the smile he flashed her following her words, but for whatever reason, all sense and rationale dropped from her mind and she pulled him down by his collar down and brought his lips to hers. He remained firmly in place, stuck to the spot but she nevertheless persisted, softening her kiss until his guard broke and she felt his hands find her waist, pulling her closer. Once her tactical plan to relax him succeeded, she was able to indulge her senses, tasting first the faint remains of ginger on his tongue. Her lips curled into a smile and he chuckled into them. 

“I was wondering what else I was going to have to do to get a kiss from you.”

She scoffed. “Could have always just tried, oh I don’t know, _kissing_ me.”

He pulled back, but only to place a small kiss on her nose. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Where’s the fun in spending hours alone in the middle of the night decorating a ship of infinite expanse in icing using a piping bag of disproportionate size?”

He grinned, dipping his head to whisper softly against her lips. “Here”.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts and requests always welcome @[loupettes](https://loupettes.tumblr.com/submit) :)


End file.
